Bedding material used in animal stalls has to be periodically removed and replaced. Such bedding material can be made of wood shavings, straw or other suitable materials. Often the stalls have dirt floors, typically made of clay, soil or even concrete floors typically with rubber mats onto which the bedding is laid.
When the animal droppings accumulate, the bedding material is often rendered useless. However, properly maintained mucking of stalls has enabled the bedding material to last over more extended periods of time.
Cleaning stalls typically is a manual effort involving labor intensive use of pitch forks and wheel barrows.
When cleaning a single stall, this method is very reliable and reasonably efficient. In larger horse farms, this chore may involve cleaning many stalls often 20 or 30 or more. In these situations, the amount of manure removed can be very large and the work extremely fatiguing.
An attempt to solve this dilemma was disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,334,538 entitled “Stall Cleaner” granted on Jan. 1, 2002. This apparatus was effectively a scoop shovel on wheels that a person operating could push into the bedding, sift out the manure and tilt it into a debris bag. The device improved the reuse of shavings, but was still manually operated. The apparatus, when loaded with manure, became very heavy and cumbersome and required manual unloading or dumping of the bag. This made the device somewhat impractical for large scale use. In fact it is only believed usable on a few stalls at most due to the lifting and weight penalties associated with its use.
The object of the present invention is to reduce or eliminate some if not all of these issues by providing a more user friendly motor driven apparatus requiring very little manual effort.